Don’t Cry, Tai Lake

was in his mid-fifties. How could he have possibly satisfied her? It would have surprised me if she hadn’t been carrying on with a young stud in secret.”
    “It served Liu right, with his heart smoked in the smell of money like the fish head on your plate.”
    “No, the dogs ate his heart long, long ago.”
    “Another question. I’m not a local, but isn’t there anyone fighting against the pollution here?” Chen said. “I was at an eatery yesterday. Uncle Wang’s, I think. It was not too far away from here. I heard about a young woman engineer who was trying to stand up for environmental protection.”
    “Oh, she’s trouble. True, she may have brought some attention to the problem. But then what? It was no use at all. The chemical company keeps on manufacturing as before, at a great cost to the lake. ”
    “And she’s an impossible bitch too,” Li said.
    Chen wasn’t sure why Li called her a bitch, but he decided not to ask.
    “You can’t keep your eyes shut all the time. So drown yourself in the cup, and forget all your worries,” Zhang said, finishing another cup in a single gulp.
    “You should go and see Liu’s house. What a magnificent mansion! It’s only three or four blocks away, but you can also see the chemical company dorm. Then you’ll understand why people want to sell their souls for money.”
    “Really!” Chen said, his voice rising with a new idea. “Thank you so much for your enlightening talk. But I think I have to leave now. Do you know if there is a cell phone store nearby?”
    “Just go straight ahead. Only half a block away. You won’t miss it. Tell them Zhang sent you there.”
    “I will. Again, thank you both so much.” He didn’t think he could get much more out of the two, so he rose to pay for the meal. It wasn’t much, but he didn’t want the two of them to go on drinking like that. If they kept getting drunker and louder, they could become a liability.
    Before he got to the cell phone store, he came to a halt. He found an envelope—the only paper he had with him—and a pen. Standing against a blossoming dogwood tree, he wrote down a jumble of fragmented lines and images that had come to him unexpectedly.
    Terrible headache—
    Go drink and forget—
    You should see a doctor, man.
    What can you see?
    In the company production chart,
    Does the boss see the curve
    of the production rising
    or that of the employees falling
    with headache, herpes, and sickness?
    Look, isn’t the pinnacle of the cooling tower
    like the nipple of a sterile woman?
    Tell me, where are you?
    At the hair ribbon of Fortune Goddess,
    or at her crutch?
     
    Another bottle of beer pops open,
    bubble, bubble, bubble …
    She pushes away the cup, walking
    into the sour drizzle and twelve o’clock.
     
    Who’s the one walking beside you?
    As before, it could be made into part of a larger whole, but he still didn’t have an exact idea of what it would be. Possibly it would be a “spatial form,” which was a term he had picked up years earlier, where the form replaced traditional narrative sequence with spatial simultaneity and disjunctive arrangement. Those long-forgotten critical details seemed to be coming back to him all of a sudden. So the stanza about the conversation between two drunkards could also fit in. She, too, finally appeared in the poem. As for the line “Who’s the one walking beside you,” it might serve as a refrain, like in the drinking game he’d just witnessed. Also, it sounded like an echo, remotely, from a poem he’d read long ago.
    He put the envelope away and resumed walking toward the cell phone store.

TEN
    IT WAS ONLY AFTER about three or four blocks that he thought he saw the dorm building for the chemical company with its many clotheslines stretching across the outside.
    He took a look around. It wasn’t yet six o’clock. In the space in front of the building, some people sat outside with their dinner in their hands. A middle-aged woman sat on a bamboo chair, soaking her feet in a plastic basin of herbal liquid. There was also a peddler squatting with his goods spread out on a white sheet under a dogwood tree. There was something eerily familiar about the peddler, Chen noticed, thinking he might have seen him somewhere. It wasn’t unimaginable for a peddler to move around in a city of tourists like Wuxi, but this wasn’t a tourist area and wasn’t a place a peddler would usually choose to set up.
    Chen approached a little boy playing with an